


Ways it Could Have Gone

by thedevilchicken



Category: Pitch Black (2000), Riddick (2013)
Genre: Artistic Liberties, Canonical Character Death, M/M, Pre-Canon, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 19:36:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4361585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mid-<i>Riddick</i>, Riddick reflects on how he first met William J Johns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ways it Could Have Gone

**Author's Note:**

> Assumes Riddick's eyeshine came from a prison visit that was neither Slam City nor Butcher Bay, and is _not_ the result of retconned Furyan weirdness.

It’s night and maybe the rain’s coming, he thinks maybe he can feel the change in the air as he watches the outpost through the dark. They’re all inside, the mercs that’re left, enough of them to make it interesting but he’s not decided which way it’ll go just yet. There’s still time. There’s time for him to take his time, the way he likes. 

He saw the second ship land. He saw the second team disembark in their pretty matching uniforms like uniforms mean a damn when you’re essentially living life as guns for hire. He knows they’re in there now, knows exactly who the guy in charge is because he’d like to think even if it hadn’t been obvious he’s pretty damn perceptive. His name is Johns. Johns Senior, of course, because Johns Junior Riddick saw die one night that maybe didn’t end for months but of course, _of course_ , everyone who cares about it must think Riddick was the one who did it. No one knows what happened there now except for him. The others are gone. Maybe he misses them and maybe he doesn’t.

And fuck, no one even knows how he met Johns the Younger in the first place. No one except him, and he remembers. 

They were stationed on a planet out in the back of beyond in the beginning, a backwater, jerkwater outpost that had nothing important on it, no natural resources to speak of unless you counted rock and dust and air so arid it left you parched in a couple of minutes flat if you forgot your breather. When it got dark there it didn’t get _dark_ , just dark _er_ , and that kinda pissed Riddick off when he thought about it. Okay, his goggles were pretty comfortable most of the time, had been designed for comfort more than style, but when the humidity spiked in the night for who the fuck knew what reason he’d wind up waking up developing sweat rash over his temples like that was an attractive look on him. He hated the place. But it was a pretty damn good cover for avoiding some new and interesting slam that he knew would otherwise be right around the corner. 

They had him billeted as a pilot and that made sense given he’d been trained as a ranger; somehow pilots were pretty scarce out there in the devil’s back yard and he knew his way around a ship or two. It meant he got to sleep on his ship, out of the general goddamn melee that was the infantry barracks or the merc encampment that reeked of boiled fish and that was a _very_ good thing, both for him and for them. The mercs he’d signed on with under some kind of damn fool assumed name had joined up with a battalion of E-TACs like mercs working with soldiers was ever a good idea considering their fundamental lack of mutual respect or understanding - the soldiers thought the mercs were scum and the mercs thought the soldiers were self-righteous assholes and both parties were pretty much right, but the heat there just made them all crazy. Crazier. He guessed you had to be pretty crazy to sign up with either group. 

He was always pleased when he got sent off-world instead of just hopping over to the other crappy-ass base on the other side of it where they actually had water they hadn’t had to drag in from another planet, couriering crap no one really needed here and there like busy work made any sense during a war, the occasional squad sitting in the back making snide comments about his shitty little ship that they knew he could hear because that was the whole fucking point. On the 24-hour, 48-hour runs from that crappy half-desert planet to the nearest actual military outposts of any significance he could’ve killed them all and flushed them out into space and before anyone knew what’d happened, if they ever worked it out at all, he’d’ve been gone. They wouldn’t’ve seen him for dust. But he stuck with it, even headstrong as he was at that age, maybe even more so than he’d gotten later on. He’d always been pretty self-aware, at least; he’d always known what he was, right in the murky part where black and white, good and evil, blurred. He never expected anyone else to understand.

In the afternoons he strung up a tarpaulin awning from the back of the ship’s small cargo bay and sat there on a beaten-up deck chair with his feet up, breathing tube in one corner of his mouth and a drink in his hand, the Marines scowling at him like it was somehow his fault they’d signed up to obey orders while he got to kick back and relax. Then one day another company of mercs came in, came on down to the surface because the godforsaken rock had used to be a free merc outpost instead of some kind of backwards-ass temporary military encampment, and though the Marines tried to push them along on their way they were pretty damn tenacious. They landed maybe 50 yards away from Riddick’s ship in a swirl of dust that would’ve pissed him off to high heaven if he weren’t already about as dusty as he could’ve gotten, and they all trooped on out wearing pretty matching uniforms just like Boss Johns and his crew would be wearing years later. 

They were mercs, it was obvious from the way they walked and talked even though all five of them were wearing shiny stars on their chests like some travesty of lawmen. Mercs came in all shapes and sizes, Riddick knew that, had gotten used to that over the years because he’d run and been caught and escaped his whole life and mercs were nothing new to him. Some fought for money, some worked security, transported goods that needed a few extra guns to keep it out of pirates’ hands, and some worked mostly as bounty hunters. Some mixed and matched and did a pretty piss-poor job for the lack of specialism, Riddick usually thought. But these guys were pretty obviously out for a bounty. Luckily, as their eyes swept over him and on into the raggedy band of other mercs and pissed off, overheated Marines, he realised they’d not come for him. They had no fucking idea who he was and that’d work out well. He went back to his drink. 

A couple of hours later, the new guys had gone and signed an agreement with the damn Marines and then there they were, fixing to take over Riddick’s off-world trips for cold, hard Marine cash because their ship was marginally bigger and didn’t have that beat-up look to the paint job. Like the fucking Marines knew a damn thing about ships because the one he was using was better maintained on the insides where it mattered, he could tell that from the way the hunk of crap new merc ship lifted off with a wheeze of her engines, nose angled down a touch more than was usual for her class. And so, when it got darker and the Marines were tucked away past curfew, when the two bands of mercs had gotten all thick as thieves over bottles of rum under an awning on camp stools they kept falling off of like asses, he waited. He waited some more. And when the other guys’ pilot took a break and strolled out into the nearby desert to piss because who the fuck wanted to use the vile Marine latrines, Riddick spirited him away without a trace, never to be seen again. Pilotless, it wasn’t like the new mercs could steal his damn route. And somehow no one thought to look at him for the disappearance. 

Of course, one pilot down, the Marines started to get antsy about the whole thing and started sending guys with him on his courier runs, guys from his team or the other one, sometimes Marines who still hadn’t gotten the fucking memo about not insulting the sensibilities of one of the only guys left who could get them off that burning fucking rock. No one asked questions when one of them got picked off in a bar fight because the guy had been a belligerent fuck at the best of times; no one asked questions when another disappeared without a trace on a food run because he’d never wanted to be a damn Marine in the first place, fucking deserter. Every couple of weeks there was another x in the column, another guy gone, and Riddick was pretty mystified that no one was paying the slightest bit of attention to that fact. Then again, he guessed some of them actually hadn’t been his fault. Some of them really _had_ deserted, and somewhere over the next three months he started to lose track of which guys he’d shived in an alley and which had just been pissed off at the damn war that no one understood but the politicians. 

And then one morning as he sat there on what had pretty much become his porch at the back of his ship under his dusty awning, one of the other mercs came over and sat himself down, dragging a deck chair over from the back of his own ship that’d been pretty much stationary since their pilot’s mysterious disappearance. He’d got a flask of fresh-made coffee in his hand and he poured a cup and offered it to Riddick; he took it, why the hell not, though he had his suspicions. 

“Hear I’m assigned to your run out to Tangier,” the guy said, not quite drawled, over his own cup of hot coffee. It was too damn hot for coffee even in the morning there but it’d been such a damn long time since Riddick had even seen it that apparently it’d been too good an offer to pass up. 

“You’re Johns?” The guy nodded. “Then yeah, just you and me.”

Johns flashed him a half-smile, all white teeth and charm that maybe worked on some guys as well as some girls, who knew, who cared. He put his feet up beside Riddick’s on the foot locker he was using as a stool and kicked back, making himself at home; Riddick was so amused by the fact that it’d taken some twenty-something merc jackass like Johns two minutes to decide he was safe to do so that he forgot to get riled over the intrusion. He let him stay all morning, shooting the shit like old friends and not like perfect strangers. The guy didn’t even flinch when he told him his name was Rich, like that was so far away from Richard B Riddick, like the notion never registered at all. It had. 

They went out to Tangier, brought back parts from the military shipyard and dicked around refitting both his ship and the other when they got back, Johns with no clue what the fuck he was doing but taking direction pretty well. The Marine colonel decided he’d just assign Johns to Riddick on a long-term basis after that, when they’d got back from the trip on schedule without one or the other having fucked off into the great unknown, so they went out to Lupus a few days later and brought back a new merc pilot for the other ship. Riddick stayed on the off-world runs while the new guy found his feet, Johns with him in the co-pilot’s seat running his mouth like that was his default state and Riddick couldn’t say it really bothered him when it came down to it. Johns was pretty agreeable company, if kinda obsessive about keeping the bays neat and tidy at all goddamn times. He started sleeping on the ship at night, in the second bunk in the cargo bay across from him, snoring to himself and Riddick couldn’t even say _that_ shit bothered him, either. It turned out he didn’t hate the guy, which he knew was a pretty resounding endorsement. 

Johns brought beers along the next time they shipped out and while they drifted out toward another world on another day like all the rest before it, they cracked open a bottle each against the worn edge of the flight console and drank in the pilots’ seats. Riddick was pretty sure the Marine CO back on whatever the fuck that planet was designated would’ve had a fit if he’d known they were drinking on the job but it was pretty hard to give a fuck when the guy was commanding some kind of dumbass training base so far away from the actual war that he might as well’ve just hung up his uniform and fucked off to a brothel with the rest of the deserters. Besides, even if the ship didn’t _really_ belong to him, it was pretty much acknowledged to be under his command.

“So you’re Riddick, right?” Johns said when they’d gotten onto their third bottle each with the others discarded, casual about it, offhand. “Escaped from Tangiers, Ribald, Hubble Bay. Killer.”

Riddick looked at him, shrugged, bottle in hand, and took a swig before he responded. “What if I am?”

Johns just leaned back, his booted feet already resting up on the console like that wasn’t more of a hazard than drinking at the wheel. “Just curious,” he said. “Didn’t say I gave a damn.” 

Riddick didn’t confirm or deny but he was pretty sure he didn’t need to because it was clear Johns knew who he was and hell, the beer wasn’t even dosed, he hadn’t tried anything at all. They just sat there and drank like nothing had changed until they got out to Thelriss and skirted Butcher Bay. It was dangerous because fuck, who knew if Johns was planning to ditch his ass at the planet’s correctional facility and collect whatever bounty was still on his head, but they landed on the second planet instead of the damn penal colony and conducted business as usual. They loaded the ship with three or four hours to spare then stopped by a bar because why the hell not. Booze and caffeine were Johns’ only vices then and they were vices Riddick found he could support.

The fight they got into only lasted a couple of minutes but even that was enough to remind Riddick of the action he’d been missing since Johns had gotten assigned to his ship. He hadn’t so much as punched a guy in months by that point and as he scrubbed blood from his knuckles afterwards, after they’d launched, recalling the satisfying crunch of a dislodged tooth under his fist, he apparently got nostalgic for the old days. If he could just bump off Johns he could go back to that. He could do it nice and slow, use that knife Johns had strapped to the shoulder of his flak vest, get it out and get it in him before Johns could even draw his gun and then take his time after that. Might’ve been fun, he thought, and afterwards he could flush him out into space, say he’d gotten shived in the fight. Except he didn’t do it. Like a fool, he left him alive and they cracked open a bottle of cheap-ass gin instead like that didn’t make them look like a pair of alcoholics in charge of a not-quite-military vessel.

They were drunk as they made their way back into the cargo bay with the autopilot engaged, leaning against each other, Johns cracking up every time they walked into a bulkhead and that was pretty fucking often. Johns tripped in the dark before they had a chance to put on the lights back there and went sprawling on his front before Riddick could stop him, laughing as he flopped drunkenly onto his back. He’d gone ahead and cut himself right over one eyebrow on the frequently sharp grating that covered the floor. Riddick pulled off his goggles for the first time in what felt like months, like they’d started to grow into the orbits of his eyes, and Johns frowned up at him in the near darkness as his blood tricked down into his hairline. 

“Shiny,” he said. 

“No shit,” Riddick said. And instead of helping him up he sat down on the floor astride Johns’ thighs. “You’re drunk.”

“Yeah, well, so are you.”

Riddick shrugged. The guy made a good point, if not a particularly an eloquent one. 

It probably wouldn’t’ve happened if they hadn’t been so drunk. They’d probably have gotten to their respective bunks and slept it off, grumbled around in the morning through a hangover that Johns would try to cure with coffee that he spent at least a couple of hours procuring on every trip they made just so he’d have enough caffeine in his diet to keep him awake on a daily basis. Johns wouldn’t’ve smirked as he ran his hands up over Riddick’s thighs like it was some kind of glorious game, like he was trying to make the murderer flinch first, and even if he had then Riddick would’ve maybe had the presence of mind to stand and get away instead of taking that as a challenge. 

Johns’ hand went down between Riddick’s thighs and Riddick watched in the half-dark as Johns’ eyes widened a fraction, like he was having second thoughts the moment he realised he was squeezing Riddick’s cock like that was a sensible move to make. But hell, credit to him, Johns didn’t balk and didn’t back down though he probably should’ve - both hands went to Riddick’s belt and he unbuckled it, shoved one hand into his underwear and wrapped that hand around him. Riddick could’ve stopped it, of course, if he’d felt inclined to; instead he just sat there and watched him, let Johns feel his cock fill and harden in his hand, let him argue with himself over just what the fuck he thought he was doing. But whatever that argument was, he apparently got through it with his fingers still stroking Riddick’s growing erection. 

“You gonna do that like you mean it?” Riddick asked, nodding to Johns’ hand. 

Johns laughed. “You’re welcome to join in at any time,” he said, and so Riddick took that opportunity to do so. He unbuckled the belt at Johns’ waist, unzipped his pants, pulled back from him just long enough to yank his pretty blue merc uniform pants down over his hips and bare his skin from waist to mid-thigh. The lines of the grating underneath him must’ve been pressing into the muscle of his ass but Johns didn’t seem to care, just watched him with an expression somewhere halfway between amusement and bemusement, like he still had very little idea what the fuck he was doing there, what the fuck _they_ were doing there like it wasn’t so obvious they’d practically telegraphed it. 

Riddick shifted down, leant down with his fingers hooked down through the bars of the floor and took him into his mouth. Johns fucking moaned at it like he probably never would’ve had he been sober, making Riddick chuckle around him, maybe half of it because he was so damn surprised either of them could still get it up in their sorry drunk-ass state. One of Johns’ hands went to the back of Riddick’s shaved head, nails at the back of his neck like that was in any way sexy, and Johns bucked his hips slightly, made Riddick bring up one hand to push down firm at Johns’ pelvis to keep him in place as he sucked, tongue working over the length of him. Then he pulled back abruptly. Johns pushed himself up into something resembling a sitting position and he yanked him into a kiss, like that made perfect sense somehow despite the fact it didn’t. 

It wasn’t that night they went all the way. They were too drunk for it to work all that well so they both climbed half-dressed and horny into Johns’ bunk and made out in a gin-soaked haze, all stubble-burn that’d last for days, rubbing together till they came in a mess that was unpleasantly sticky between them by morning. _All the way_ was the morning instead, hungover and irritable, cursing at each other as they stripped just enough clothing to make it work. Johns went up on his knees on the bunk, spread his legs as far as the pants still there round his knees would allow; Riddick had one knee on the crappy mattress and one foot on the floor as he slicked his cock with some kind of grease he wasn’t sure was the ideal substance to get in contact with anyone’s private areas then pushed inside him. Johns pushed against him, cursing into the pillow as he dropped his head down onto his hands. Riddick thrust hard into him, cursing as his fingers dug into Johns’ hips and his back ached from a night on a bed that was too fucking small. It wasn’t like he’d meant to start fucking a merc, but he guessed it wasn’t like it was explicitly on the no-go list, either. 

The whole base picked up and moved forward a couple of weeks after that, Riddick and Johns flying out with bands of troops in the cargo bay and dropping them off on yet another planet that didn’t exactly seem hospitable to human life. It was darker there and Riddick guessed that had to be good, but he saw it in maybe eight hour shifts as they settled into some kind of dumbass rhythm of fucking in the mornings or late at night or whenever the fuck they were meant to be sleeping, pulling at each other’s clothes almost hard enough tear and sometimes managing it, before they were back to the desert and another set of troops in an endless, draining fucking cycle of drops and pickups for two whole weeks. If he hadn’t been murderous before he was pretty sure that would’ve driven him to it; three guys met their demise falling off of catwalks over the cargo bay en route and maybe if anyone had thought to check any closer they would’ve seen their necks had been neatly snapped _before_ the fall. He was pretty sure Johns knew, judging by the way he looked at him across the cargo bay when each body was discovered. He was pretty sure Johns didn’t care, however, because it wasn’t in him naturally and then because he wasn’t paid to. They screwed instead, like Johns got off on the danger of it.

It was maybe a week after their final landing when Johns showed up at the ship in a spiffy new pseudo-uniform with a bright silver star and Riddick was damn sure he didn’t have to worry about him turning him in or shipping him off for the bounty. Johns had gone and done it; he’d leveraged some training or other he’d had back in the first days of the war with the dumb-fuck Marine Military Police and gotten his merc ass assigned to locate deserters. All that obsessive-compulsive militarian shit he was into would probably pay off, could mean a pretty fucking payday, who knew. Riddick laughed at him when he told him; Johns bristled but then Riddick poured him a drink and that was apparently enough to make him calm the fuck back down. He sat down under the awning Riddick had put up more or less out of habit because it wasn’t like they had a burning sun or arid air to deal with there, just a chilly wind that tugged at the tarp and meant they both had to put on jackets instead of sitting there in shirtsleeves. 

“I got you assigned with me,” Johns said, later, after the first couple of slow-drunk drinks as they resolutely didn’t shiver under the darkening sky as the wind picked up. 

“I figured you would have,” Riddick said. 

Johns didn’t ask if he objected; even if he had, he knew he couldn’t’ve actually voiced an opinion because Johns knew exactly who he was and what he was worth to the right people. So the next morning he went with him, the merc pilot with the merc hunter on the lookout for deserted soldiers like either of them thought that was a good use of their time. But it’d pay. And they’d probably be good at it.

Riddick was pretty sure neither of them had thought it would last too long and it didn’t. Six months of that shit, Johns tracking down guys who didn’t feel like fighting while Riddick put his feet up in the ship and pretended it didn’t feel a little like watching his own fate every time Johns locked them up in the holding cell they’d had installed by one of the forward bulkheads. Six months of drinking too much and fucking too much and wondering when Johns was going to turn on him and ship him off to whichever slam would pay the most, waking up with the inside of his mouth tasting like hell on earth and Johns sprawled half on top of him, heavy, like the cargo bay bunks were meant to hold any more than one guy at a time. He should’ve killed him before he could take him in. Instead, when they came back to base, in the midst of an attack, he cold-cocked him with the butt of his own gun and left him there. He’d survive or he wouldn’t and Riddick wouldn’t be the one deciding that, though he guessed he’d regret it later. 

Popular opinion said Riddick was the only one who made it off that planet alive out of 500 men. Popular opinion said he’d killed most of his own platoon himself, massacred them and then fled the scene. That wasn’t _quite_ right, though he didn’t feel all that much like correcting the record to point out William J Johns had been there, too, and survived the night at least. Sometimes, after, he wondered how many of those 500 men Johns had killed to get to a ship and how many were Riddick after all. 

When he saw him again, later, maybe years after that, Johns was different, harder, and that was good in a merc, damn useful in a bounty hunter. When Johns caught him, finally took him out to Butcher Bay, he had to admit he was almost impressed. And when Johns glared at him the way he did, whenever he saw him after that because fuck if their whole lives weren’t entangled up until the point where Johns died, he knew what the look meant: Johns felt betrayed because Riddick had left him there. He felt like pointing out Johns would’ve done the same to him in the end but that felt kinda petty. 

It’s dark now and that’s something Riddick can use to his advantage. There’s another Johns out there, waiting, another Johns who wants him dead and it’s a strangely familiar feeling because for so many goddamn years it was all about Riddick and that blue-eyed devil no matter who caught him, no matter which slam he was in or which slam he’d just escaped from. Even Johns had known that; maybe Johns even knew that the shiv he pushed in there by his spine that day wasn’t a miss, wasn’t a failed kill but _to be continued_. Maybe if the doctors had done a better job, maybe if the stupid ass hadn’t wound up taking enough morphine on a daily basis to down a fucking horse, it never would’ve ended. Maybe he regrets that. Maybe not.

He’d like to tell Boss Johns all about his kid, blue-eyed Billy Johns who’d gotten himself involved with a convicted killer because he’d thought maybe the two of them were opposites and not the same, like the fact he wore some meaningless badge meant he was better and Riddick worse. He’d like to tell Boss Johns his son was almost right, nearly there, because damn if he wasn’t a killer right to the end and for a second as he died maybe he’d seen the irony of his position. He’d like to tell him he wasn’t the sort of man a father could be proud of, but at least one guy in the universe had understood precisely who he was, and accepted it even when he couldn’t himself. 

It’s dark now and there’s any number of ways the night could end, Riddick knows that. Maybe he’ll kill them all and maybe he won’t. But in the end he’ll still be thinking about nights in a shitty skiff on a bunk that made his back ache, about William J Johns and all the times they could’ve killed each other but somehow didn’t go through with it. He’ll be thinking about the shiv in Johns’ back, blood on his hands, the expression on his face like they hadn’t known how it had to end all along. 

When it’s over, he’ll be thinking of all the ways it could’ve gone and didn’t.


End file.
